Classic Movie Review : Altered States (1980)
Before Joe Rogan franchised psychedelic tourism into a podcast-friendly lifestyle for dudes who think a kettlebell is a personality, chemically-assisted spirituality was a murkier and scarier business. Ayahuasca retreats and mail-order magic mushroom weren’t a thing back then and altering your consciousness felt ominous, like signing a legal document you didn’t understand and hoping for the best.
You heard rumors: monks somewhere licking toads, scientists somewhere else mainlining God, all of it sounding like a 50/50 gamble between enlightenment and a permanent psych ward residency. Which is exactly why Ken Russell’s Altered States could only have been made in 1980: a film from a flamboyant and provocative director aimed at an audience who was terrified of the very thing they were paying to watch.
You had to be alive before internet to understand.
Altered States follows Edward Jessup (played by the late, great William Hurt), a neuroscientist who decides the best way to understand schizophrenia is to basically give it to himself because nothing says "scientific progress" like destabilizing your own brain chemistry. What follows is two hours of Hurt tripping face-first into cosmic nonsense while slowly alienating friends and family.
The breaking point comes when he discovers a mystical hallucinogenic brew from a tribe of Hinchi natives (basically ayahuasca before ayahuasca had a PR firm) which predictably gives him way more enlightenment than he ever bargained for.
Scientifically Tripping Balls
Altered States plays like a self-serious Cheech & Chong spin-off on the surface, but buried under the lava-lamp visuals are ideas worth exploring. For all its psychedelic pageantry, the film keeps circling one uncomfortable question: what’s the actual point of all this "rational" inquiry? If your research methods involve alienating your loved ones, getting fucked up, and disappearing into a sensory deprivation tank just to prove a theory nobody outside your department even cares about, are you really doing science, bro?
Or are you just another wacko priest, worshipping at the altar of your own ego, casting a new dogma in the language of neurotransmitters and brain scans? Jessup himself doesn’t even seem sure.
As a de facto guardian of human welfare, Jessup carries a kind of institutional gravitas: revered for his brilliance, feared for his volatility. That’s why Ken Russell’s gaze matters so much here: it’s less the sober eye of a documentarian and more the gleeful leer of a carnival barker daring you to look closer. He films Jessup as a man drunk on his own hypotheses, a supposedly rational scientist sliding into pure irresponsibility. Jessup definitely connects to something in his trips, but he has no idea what it is or how to interact with it.
Before the Hinchi potion even enters the picture, Jessup’s "research" has the same intellectual rigor as a college stoner: chasing ineffable feelings because naming them would make them less magical. And that’s why both Jessup as a protagonist and Altered States as a premise actually work. Because there really are dimensions of experience our species just isn’t wired to comprehend. Even worse, the people in charge of probing those dimensions aren’t cautious explorers, they’re thrill-seekers with tenure.
They’re not charting new territory so much as scientifically tripping balls, mistaking their own hallucinations for a map of the universe.
Not Knowing What The Fuck is Going On
The fear of the unknown has always been horror’s favorite engine, but Altered States revs a particular kind of dread that belonged to the pre-Google era. Imagine telling anyone before 1994 that someday you’d carry a rectangle in your pocket with the answer to every conceivable question,they’d assume you’d been dosed with whatever Jessup was cooking. Back then, intrusive thoughts metastasized into urban legends before you had time to fact-check them at the library and you didn’t feel like doing it anyway.
Oddly enough, the legends made the world a more vibrant and meaningful place. Simple things felt threatening, and complicated things remained this giant, pulsing void you couldn’t name, let alone understand. That’s the terror Russell taps into: not just the monsters hiding in the dark, but the possibility that the dark itself is infinite, hungry, and indifferent to whether you ever come back from it. The way Altered States mirrors that possibility without ever leaning too much into it is what makes its power.
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Maybe Altered States didn’t age in any way that makes linear sense. I can’t imagine anyone under thirty watching it and walking away convinced they understood what the hell just happened for 103 minutes. Half the movie is just William Hurt, eyes bugging out, stuttering in front of proto-Green Screen psychedelia and that’s not even the weird part.
Yet somehow it still lands, because underneath the lava-lamp visuals and academic gibberish, the film is circling a question that never expires: what’s the line between knowledge and experience? Between what we can see and what actually is? That uncertainty, cloaked in neon, sweat, and bad trip energy, remains ghoulish enough to stick.
7.5/10
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